30 September 2023
Final Sunday in the Season of Creation
Lectionary texts:
Our lectionary readings today did not include the well-known account of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet in John 13. Rather, they illuminate that event. So let us recall: During his final meal with his disciples Jesus surprises them by assuming the role of the lowest servants in a household, taking towel and basin to wash their feet. Philippians 2 echoes this act. The Lord of heaven and earth is not ashamed to come low, obedient in his mission even unto death. Along the way, he upends expectations of class and status, abandoning exploitation. He does not even exploit his equality with God. Oh, and in a bit of comic relief, Peter asks for a bath, head-to-toe, missing Jesus’ point. And so, …
I wonder: If Jesus, the Christ, the 2nd person of the Trinity, has humbled himself this much, being “born in human likeness, taking the form of a slave,” what might that kind of humanness include? Might it include an embrace of the interconnected, relational humanity that indigenous peoples affirm when they name rivers and bears and frogs and trees “our relatives”?
Indeed, I wonder: Might we be called to wash those relatives’ feet too? But how? Both in the wild, and around our Lake Superior town on the land of the Anishinaabe, I have met a few bears. … Wash their feet? … You see the problem. Or might we somehow wash the feet of a watershed or an ecosystem? A bit abstract for such a concrete act … but maybe.
Likewise, I wonder: How are we who are settlers to wash the feet of indigenous peoples – but without paternalism, the paternalism that has so often turned well-meaning intentions behind … mission schools, for example, into tragic results contributing to cultural genocide?
Perhaps those two brothers in the Gospel reading might help us. One has good intentions but doesn’t do the will of his father. The other makes no promises but ends up doing. By analogy, climate change skeptics sometimes put up solar panels in order to live off the grid and depend less on the “gov’ment” that they distrust, or put up windfarms just because market capitalism will reward them. Meanwhile, well-meaning progressives sometimes turn all NIMBY (“Not in MY backyard!”) if that windfarm obstructs the scenic view of the natural environment they claim to love. Hmmm. More to wonder about.
Yet once we start to bring those two brothers into our own modern setting by way of analogy, we may have to admit: Often our biggest problem is not our willingness to do something for the sake of the natural world. Rather, our biggest problem is knowing exactly what we are to do, especially when nothing we do seems to be enough. And so, we end up praying Psalm 25 with fresh anguish: “Make me to know your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths! Instruct [us] sinners,” who have so harmed your good gifts of creation!
The best that most of us can do may be to start with small changes that we know are inadequate, but hopefully constitute next steps on the way to more next steps. The trick is to affirm this without inviting either complacency or mere greenwashing.
A bit of the humility of which the Psalmist sang might come from admitting that no, we really are not sure which of the two brothers we are. I suspect that most of us, in this room at least, grimace when climate-change deniers stop denying, only to say that the problem is just too big to solve anyway. Still, we wouldn’t know how to live more like indigenous peoples of the world even if we tried; a relatively low-impact Amish lifestyle might be more accessible to some of us, but honestly, we don’t want to go that far, do we? Likewise, we object when others refuse even to discuss reparations for slavery or land theft, claiming it is unfair to “punish” the present generation for the sins of our forebears, however regrettable. Yet even policymakers who do favor reparations face a tangle of challenges figuring out how best to implement them.
Like Peter, once we decide to go with Jesus’ program, it can be tempting to cry out for a complete bath, from feet to hands to head. After all, it really would be best if we could reverse climate change entirely, no? Of course. Yet Peter’s desire for some grand gesture or radical solution may actually distract him from the work he most needs to do, and can do, now.
At the risk of turning out to be the brother who promises but fails to deliver, let me share a personal example: Joetta and I occasionally ask ourselves if we should at least bequeath the deed for the land we live on back to the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians in our region. Located where we are, I’m not sure they’d have much use for it. So maybe sell and donate the proceeds? Easier, yes, but to whom? Well, this much is clear: Joetta and I have practically been adopted into an extended Maya family in Guatemala, yet we have barely begun to know our Anishinaabe regional neighbors in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. So first we would have to learn to know them well enough to know what would actually help.
And that, I think, is where we find a clue that coincides with the point that Peter was missing when he asked for a precipitous bath that would cleanse him all at once, and with it, would painlessly cleanse his conscience.
After a lifetime of fish oil getting into his pores, and three years of sweating through hikes with Jesus up and down Palestine, Peter was almost certainly a smelly guy. The grand gesture by which Jesus would wash “not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” might have done him some good. Nonetheless, a grand gesture would still have obscured Jesus’ lesson. Because that lesson was first of all relationship – transformed, restructured relationship.
12After [Jesus] had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, ‘Do you know what I have done to you? 13You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. 14So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. 16Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them.
Picking up the thread later in the evening, however, Jesus continues:
I do not call you servants any longer, … but I have called you friends. (John 15:15)
Now, if the key here is Jesus’ transformation of class-bound, privilege-distorted relationships into friendships, then I do require one crucial clarification. The claim that “Some of my best friends are black,” or “…Native American,” or “…First Nations,” usually functions as a lame excuse to avoid facing both internalized and structural racism. Yet often, I suspect, it is lame because it isn’t really true in the first place. Sure, the person saying this has acquaintances with people of color. Sure, they experience camaraderie on battlefields or sports fields. Sure, they have drinking buddies. But acquaintances, drinking buddies and teammates are not yet true friends. For if “some of our best friends” really are __fill_in_the_blank__, then some of our best, most honest, most challenging, most searing and change-provoking conversations have been with them. If those friendships have been true ones, they have not left us smug or complacent or defensive. Those friendships have turned us into the brother who may indeed have answered “I will not,” at first, but who later changed his mind and went and did.
So on one side of transformed, restructured relationship: doing:
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
On the other side of such relationship, vulnerability, apparently even for Jesus:
but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.
Thus, as our relationships develop into true friendships: both vulnerability and doing. These are friendships restructured according to the example that Jesus set when he washed his disciples’ feet. Serve one another, yes – that’s the long-standing lesson that Mennonites like to highlight. But for service to not be paternalistic – to not tap into a white savior complex – we really do need to start by just becoming, then just being, friends. True friends, vulnerable, listening, and then responsive to one another.
And allies? Surely. But I for one do not like to call myself an ally. I hope I am an ally to many, but that is for others to decide. Otherwise, I presume. Otherwise, I indeed risk being like the brother that says, “Sure dad, I’ll work in the field,” but doesn’t. Or maybe even worse, I “do” something, but with self-righteous intentions, while actually being too clueless to do much good.
And so too, with the ecosystems and watersheds in which we live. There is so much to do – and undo – in order to slow down and mitigate planetary climate change. But can we start with wonder? Can we start by befriending? Perhaps yes, if we let specific places and their local wonder restructure our values, or priorities, and thus, our doing.
If so, in that sense, maybe we can wash the feet of ecosystems and our non-human relatives too, by no longer calling them merely our servants, something we might dominate, but rather, our relatives and our friends.